Huge Arapaima gigas at the Dallas World Aquarium
- Thread starter dbenson
- Start date
I went today and saw them in person. There are 6 or 7 of them and they're all around 4-5 feet long. I also got to see them feed the silver arowanas ( fairly large, hardly any drop eye at all!) and the spotted rays. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera 
. There was also a medium jardini arowana in the outdoor pond at the entrance.
. There was also a medium jardini arowana in the outdoor pond at the entrance.
I used to be the Sr. Aquarist there for a long time. That exhibit was a daily chore, let me tell you. Those arapaima are less than three years old. I'd say they're closer to 6' plus. The curved glass doesn't do them justice at all. That pool is roughly 200,000 gallons. It is 4 feet at the shallow point (heading into manatee holding) and right around 20 feet deep in the back.
Outdoors are Asian arows....at least they were when I was there.
EDIT: If you guys watch at 12:30 (local time) there is a daily feeding with a diver in the water.
Outdoors are Asian arows....at least they were when I was there.
EDIT: If you guys watch at 12:30 (local time) there is a daily feeding with a diver in the water.
Yeah its a neat place, I spoke to the curator out there over christmas break and they were barely over 2 years old the biggest ones are around 5ft I would say. I've got a ton of pics on my other comp that I'll try to post soon. The tank is close to 80ft wide i would say with a big island in the middle. Shortly before I visited a couple weeks prior the curator told me a arapaima grabbed one of the ducks off the top of the water then spit him out later and that they have had the HUGE red tails take 1 out also. The tank is so big that there are 4ft red tails schooling in groups of 4-5 in the middle sections of water and schools of peacock bass as big as 10 fish or more that I saw. Most of the Pbass are probably in the 5-7lb range I don't think I saw any bigger than that for now. Theres also a 3ft tiger shovelnose in there, tons of huge what look like motoro rays and huge amazon turtles. Its one of the best public aquariums I've ever been to lots of other polka dot rays in different displays, several 2-3ft silver arrowanas, and an electric eel. The only amazon exhibit I've seen that was anywhere close was in Italy last summer, the tank was much much smaller but they had several Tiger shovelnose in the 3ft range, a 4ft planiceps, tons of huge pacu, and another weird shovelnose that I didn't know what it was kinda like a hybrid looking planiceps and a tigershovelnose cross. ~Trent
The tank the arapaimas are in remind of Sea World in San Diego. Very neat place, but they have small silver dollars swimming around. They only had one arapaima from what I saw, but around 6-7 Red Tail Catfish, with more then 5 Stingrays of some sort. It was very neat to seem them with manatees though.
